Re: RFC: GCC 4.4 criteria - add Fortran as primary language?

[Tobias Burnus <burnus at net-b dot de>]

David Daney wrote:
> Joe Buck wrote:
> > Maybe there could be a "semi-primary" or "experimental primary" status;
> > a feature could be treated as primary, but with the understanding that
> > the requirement will be waived if it causes excessive delay.  The
> > "experimental" label could be dropped after a few successful releases.
>
> What is the real purpose of being a primary language?

From my point of view essentially only that regressions can be marked 
P1 to P3 and are thus on the radar of release manager. If some serious 
wrong-code regression has been found, I think it is good if it shows up 
as serious regression and not simply gets the comment
"Fortran is not release critical -> P4".

If Fortran were release critical, bugs could still be downgraded to P4 - 
either because it is seen as no release critical bug or no patch could 
be provided in time. (I think that Fortran PRs are a bit more likely to 
be downgraded by the RM than C PRs thus it would be anyway effectively a 
semi-primary language. Besides, also for primary languages the number of 
regressions is not zero and there are test-suite failures.)

So far, fortunately there were only few "release-critical" Fortran 
regressions and there were fixed quickly thus there was no problem in 
practice.

Regarding the number of test-suite failures: I think the number of 
failures is relatively low (see François-Xavier's email); we try to 
reduce them to zero, but without direct access to failing systems it 
takes a bit longer. Also several failures are libc problems, though one 
needs to verify this - on one system it might be due to a libc bug but 
on another it is a real bug (which is on the first system either not 
present or hidden by the libc bug).

> The only benefit I can really see is that it makes good PR.

For me this is less important, but granted it is also a benefit (-:

Tobias